Weeknotes #13

April requires close observation. Arriving at what still feels like the start of the year, it promptly dispatches you in May, with summer just around the corner. Before you know it, the year has fast reached its conclusion. I’ll need to be especially diligent noting down the occurrences this month throws up.

That said, this week was far less eventful than that which proceeded it. Monday night saw the final episode of This Time with Alan Partridge. Having spent a good hour chatting with Fred about the relative merits of the series¹, I’ve been debating whether to write down my thoughts and observations in more detail. The show certainly had its moments (not least an Irish Alan Partridge lookalike singing Come Out, Ye Black and Tans on primetime television), yet the piecemeal format made for uneven episodes, while its reliance on location-based reports undermined the developing relationship between Alan and Jennie meant to drive the narrative arc of the series. With few of the catchphrase worthy moments so apparent in the earlier series, I doubt This Time will live long in the memory.

Speaking of unremarkable, on Wednesday I joined some colleagues on a field trip to Loughborough. Unfortunately, my one interesting story about this East Midlands town (that of an Australian at a railway station asking about trains to ‘Lugabaruga’) was dismantled during Monday’s planning meeting. It turns out this mispronunciation is fairly common knowledge. Still, it was lovely to meet the admissions team at Loughborough University and gain some valuable insights about the issues our service will need to address for it to be considered a success.

On Friday evening, I trundled up to Walthamstow to catch up with Cennydd and Anna who ensured I was extremely well fed, to the extent that I left the next day carrying practically a bucket of leftovers! The rest of the weekend has been fairly relaxed; it mostly involved preparing the company accounts and eyeing up things to buy given my impending return to liquidity – though I should probably hold off on all that until the next deadline for Brexit has been determined.

Footnotes

1. DfE people are my kinda people. ↩︎